Interesting Engineering & Technology

This blog is often an AOR blog. For those from rock radio, they understand the real meaning behind “AOR” — All Over the Road. Sometimes the links are of historical items, strange things, technology, and yes, even broadcasting. This time around, a review of some technology including engineering-type links.

Coulter’s Science/Engineer/Technical Forums There are many “Edison/Tesla types” out in the world today still inventing and reinventing daily. I came across a video of Mr. Coulter and his home “fusion energy” device for generating power. Now in all honesty, some of this stuff could be dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing because he discusses everything from nuclear energy to RF to many home-brewed devices. This fellow is fascinating and so are his blogs. If you love home-brewing technology, you’ll love getting lost in his forum.

Solar Energy Solar energy technology prices continue to fall. According to this link, nearly 60% in just the last three years. This is probably no thrill to power companies, but to consumers, it’s a great way to save money ... and the planet! One station I know of (since my former PD was the GM at this station a number of years later) is actually solar-powered. KFMU in Steamboat Springs, Colo., has been solar for a number of years (and wind-powered as well). Here are two links. The first concerns solar energy for your home, while the second link will take you to KFMU.

Li-Fi … a Faster Wi-Fi? In the spirit of invention, Li-Fi is a developing technology for using light instead of RF for transferring data. It’s VLC, or Visible Light Communications, and uses common LEDs to provide data transfer in speeds beyond 224 Gbps! Theoretically, that’s about 18 movies of 1.5 GB each downloaded in one single second! If you want to learn more, here’s an interesting article from Interesting Engineering.

Broadcast Engineering Notes If you aren’t familiar with David Hall, he writes some great blogs on broadcast technology. Bookmark David’s site.

The Future … As a kid who grew up grabbing every copy of Popular Science, this website shares a modern day but similar feel. You’ll see right away there are some fascinating articles on everything from capturing carbon to reduce greenhouse gas to the possibility of a “tow boat for space.” It’s interesting to see what the future could hold!

And finally… With the recent passing of Adam West, who we remember as Batman from the 1960s TV series and the mayor from Family Guy (among other things), I thought I’d share a little-known song from “Batman.” This is called “Miranda.”

If you stumble across a good or unusual website that might be of interest, please don’t hesitate to send me the link and any info you might have about it. My email address is dan_slentz@yahoo.com.